A Query Scope Agent for Flood Search Routing Protocols

Flood-search on-demand routing has received considerable interest for its application to mobile ad hoc networks. To alleviate the effects of flooding the network with control packets to discover a route, the concept of an expanding ring search (ERS) has been proposed elsewhere for reducing the packet transmission overhead of the route discovery process. Essentially, ERS consists of incrementally increasing the allowable hop radius of the flood search until a route to the target node is returned. However, ERS incurs additional latency to successfully complete the route discovery procedure. This paper presents a query scope agent (QSA) that assists in the selection of an appropriate ERS. The QSA accepts as input, from the user or network application, a maximum allowable value for route discovery delay. The QSA then estimates network parameter values to determine an ERS approach that satisfies the delay requirement while reducing expected packet transmission overhead. Simulation results show that it successfully achieves this objective. Further, the QSA incurs little communication and computation overhead, and operates in a distributed and asynchronous fashion.